Nonprofits, tribes and local governments filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Trump administration over its termination of federal environmental justice and climate justice grants.

Lead counsel Southern Environmental Law Center, along with Earthjustice, Lawyers for Good Government and other groups, filed the class-action lawsuit in federal court on behalf of grant recipients from at least a dozen states, including Alaska, Colorado, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and Vermont.

The complaint against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency argues the grant terminations were unlawful because Congress approved them. Earlier this year, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin canceled more than 400 environmental justice grants totaling $1.7 billion.

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Tom Cormons, executive director of plaintiff Appalachian Voices, wrote in a statement that the lawsuit is “not just for our own grant and the communities it serves, but for this program as a whole.”

“America’s support for homegrown, local solutions to serious problems is crucially important,” he wrote. “We are happy to be going to bat.”

In Kentucky, Brooke Perry Pardue, president and CEO of Parks Alliance of Louisville, another plaintiff, said the loss of funds has forced the group to cut staff.

“We’ve been forced to scale back plans to expand access to greenspace in one of the city’s most underserved neighborhoods that is severely impacted by urban heat island effect,” Pardue said in a statement. “And we’re having to stretch every dollar even further at a time when operating costs are already extremely tight.”

Environmental justice measures aim to ensure that all people, regardless of race or income, have access to healthy environments. Many of the terminated grants were aimed at reducing environmental health harms, such as high asthma rates and poor air quality, in minority or low-income communities,

The Biden administration awarded the grants through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.